You are here

British & Scottish Politics

This is the third blog in the series ‘What next for…’ following the UK General Election 2017. Marco Biagi was SNP MSP for Edinburgh Central, 2011-16 and served as Minister for Local Government and Communities, 2014-16. He is currently completing a political science PhD at Yale University.

Recall the reaction of Brenda from Bristol on 18th April when the British General Election was announced: ‘You’re joking! Not another one! Oh, for God’s sake. Honestly, I can’t stand this…’. Brenda had experienced: the 2015 General Election, 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2017 English council elections, and was about to undergo the 2017 General Election.

The party of Union may well end up its gravedigger, says David McCrone, if the battle for independence settles down to a long war between ‘progressive’ Scotland and ‘reactionary’ England with a right-wing government at Westminster coupled with a Scottish Tory outlier and cheer-leader.

Already late, the launch of the SNP manifesto was held back until yesterday (30 May) by the Manchester bombing. The phrase ‘in Washington, everything is political’ now applies worldwide in the cynical world of professional politics but even the most hard-bitten were sobered by an attack on a demographic weighted to young women and children at one of the largest indoor arenas in Europe where life-threatening panic was superimposed on the explosion.

The fourth in a series of five podcasts coinciding with the UK General Election Campaign.This week Professor Nicola McEwen and Dr Alan Convery of the University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Science look at the UK nations and discuss whether this is a territorial election.

In the first of our new blog series, Politics in a Changing Spain, Dr Robert Liñeira (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) looks at the recent parliamentary election and its implications for the future of Spanish politics.

In their contribution to our majority nationalism series, Antoine Bilodeau of Concordia University and Luc Turgeon of the University of Ottawa share the result of their survey which compares the way in which Quebecers and Canadians construct community boundaries.